7/04/2007

As a former Fort Wayne resident who’s now a Vermonter, I was amused at the irony of Gregg Bender’s illustration with the Associated Press story “Free, independent Vermont? Pro-secession residents see U.S. as corrupt” (June 8).

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Vermonters love to make fun of our own naïve earnestness, and the secession movement deserves an especially big laugh. Still, it’s this same naïve earnestness that led Vermont to be the first state in the union to outlaw slavery, the first to allow poor landless citizens to vote, the first to institute public schools for all, the first to provide health insurance for all children, and in 2000, the first to grant equal citizenship to all couples. That might not hold up in the annals of legislative history to Indiana’s decades-long struggle to figure out what time it is, but, hey, it’s not bad for a “bastion of countercultural dissent” one-tenth Indiana’s size. So be nice, and next time, please, no soup-pan helmets. That’s what really hurt.